Cheapster unimpressed with oil sprayer

She says she's going to stick with the expensive variety that comes in a can.

April 06, 2013|Spencer Soper | On The Cheap

We shared a great tip from Abby Weaver in Allentown last year who pours cooking oil into a plastic spray bottle to grease pans and casserole dishes rather than buying canned cooking spray.

We estimated her tip would save you $295.40 over 20 years, so, of course, the feedback was phenomenal.

One cheapster, however, wasn't doing cartwheels about our calculations. Sherry Kuzma in South Whitehall Township was skeptical about some of the assumptions we made in the On The Cheap lab. Experience has shown her that cheap spray bottles wear out over time, so you'd have to replace them, which would nullify any savings on oil.

In response to Abby's tip, we also heard from Seth Opeil, marketing coordinator at Delta Industries, which makes cooking oil spray bottles for restaurants and institutions and wanted to start marketing them for household use. Seth sent us a sample bottle, and we passed it along to Sherry for a consumer test.

We figured who better to give the sprayer a trial run than someone who has tried alternatives and has been disappointed.

We set her up with the sprayer back in August, so she's had it several months.

Sherry wasn't doing cartwheels about the Evo cooking oil sprayer, either. She's going to stick with cans of cooking spray, even though you pay more.

"It's OK," Sherry said about the Evo. "There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't come out as a nice even spray like the cans you get at the store. It comes out in a stream."

Even though you pay more for the oil when you buy it in a spray can, Sherry said those cans actually last her a long time. She fears the spray bottle requires her to use too much oil to coat a surface, which she considers wasteful.

You can see Sherry use both the Evo and a cooking spray can in a video at http://www.mcall.com/onthecheap.

Seth told us the company is still working on getting a household cooking oil sprayer to market, but it might not be until summertime. Positive responses from users of the commercial cooking oil sprayer have them convinced there is a good household market, he said.

"Some college food service programs and restaurants have reported thousands of dollars worth of savings this past year after they made the switch from using aerosol pan sprays to using Evo in oil application," Seth said. "An article in Cook's Illustrated cited the cost of using spray cans at 60 cents per ounce versus non-aerosol reusable sprayers, like Evo, at only 9 cents per ounce."